I think you're missing the point. You can't bash Ruby because you wrote shitty code in Ruby. What do you want to bet I can write a shitty message queue in Scala? Does that mean Scala is bad? "Reliable, high performance, correct and maintainable" have nothing to do with the language you've chosen.
You can't bash Ruby because you wrote shitty code in Ruby.
If by "bashing" you mean claiming that Ruby was less suitable than Scala, why not? When a language isn't suitable for a particular application, that manifests as shitty code. Needing a bunch of hand-coded runtime type checks to prevent new bugs from creeping into the code suggests that a statically typed language would be more appropriate.
Of course, an infinitely intelligent programmer could have written Twitter in assembly, Brainfuck, or even C. There exists a positive integer N such that Ruby would have worked if all the Twitter developers had IQ >= N. (Please, nobody think too hard about that statement. I'm just making a point.)
So maybe they were just too stupid to use Ruby. But in that case, they were right to switch to another language, and they were right to report that Scala helped them succeed where they failed with Ruby.
You're dead wrong. If the code you write in Ruby tends to be shittier than the code you write in Scala, then you're a damn fool if you continue to write your code in Ruby.
"Reliable, high performance, correct and maintainable" has _tons_ to do with choice of language. Maybe not everything, but it's ridiculous to claim that there's no correlation between any of those factors and the language you use - there are various tradeoffs with different languages, and again, you'd be a fool to ignore them. There's a reason people don't code Web 2.0 stuff in Assembly, and there's a reason people don't code graphics drivers in Python.
That said, what is best for Twitter is probably not best for you. Your Ruby code probably _is_ better than your Scala code would be, and maybe it runs more than fast enough for your purposes. That's fine. Twitter has blown up practically from nothing into one of the stars of the Internet, so obviously they have different priorities. I doubt many people have ever had to deal with scaling issues like they have, so their experiences are pretty much irrelevant to the rest of us.
""" "Reliable, high performance, correct and maintainable" have nothing to do with the language you've chosen."""
I totally don't agree with this. Sure, it all comes down to good architecture and common sense but in reality some languages are simply not the right solution for interesting backend stuff.
Ruby is great for web apps and it is a clear winner there, but I would never ever use it for anything long-lived and high performance on the backend or 'service' side. As the Twitter guys discovered, Scala on top of the JVM is a much better choice for that.
